When Sybille arrives in Paris from Guadeloupe with her infant son, she encounters the extravagant and marvelous Lila. Sybille is young and black with her life still ahead of her; an ex-actress, Lila is white and seventy years old. Despite their differences, the women become inseparable. Haunted by memories, Lila confides in Sybille and, among other things, relates the endless cycle of lovers in her life. Her most cherished memories are of Henry, a black man from the British Caribbean whom ...

From master storyteller J. M. G. Le Clézio: winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe African is a work of bewitching beauty and humanity. With penetrating prose and an eye for lyrical detail, he vividly captures the rhythmic space of his memoir’s African backdrop and makes bare the universal complexity of father-son relationships. A triumph!—Chinua AchebeA short autobiographical account of a crucial moment in Nob...

From master storyteller J. M. G. Le Clézio: winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe African is a work of bewitching beauty and humanity. With penetrating prose and an eye for lyrical detail, he vividly captures the rhythmic space of his memoir’s African backdrop and makes bare the universal complexity of father-son relationships. A triumph!—Chinua AchebeA short autobiographical account of a crucial moment in Nob...

A masterpiece from J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The parallel stories of a lost culture in the North African desert and their descendants, unwanted immigrants in Europe.Desert is two stories. The first takes place between 1909 and 1912 and is about the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men. They are warriors of the desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, ...

The Black Terrorist is a fictional account built around the true, extraordinary, but little-known story of Addi Bâ. Addi Bâ was born in Guinea about 1916, brought to France in the late 1930s, and became a riflemen in the Twelfth Regiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais (African soldiers from French colonies) fighting for France during World War II. Captured after the Battle of the Meuse, Addi escapes from German forces, wanders in the forests, before finding refuge in a village in the V...

"You took my baby from me, Mum! She should be here with us and her siblings, not stuck with two old stupid fools like you!"She looked through me like I was invisible, pathetically calling out to her husband, in the next room. This woman was incapable of taking responsibility for anything!"Don…Don, don't you think I did the right thing? I did the right thing, didn't I, Don?!"He didn't answer.Our mother-daughter relationship was always tumult...